by Brian Haig
“You… uh, you what? You dated him for five months?”
“Regularly.”
“Then… what about witnesses? There must’ve been witnesses?”
“No, no witnesses. At least, none I know of. When you’re a gay in the Army, Major, you’re extraordinarily careful about these things. You get very expert at sneaking around in the dark. And if you’re a Korean, it’s even worse.”
“Why?”
“Why what? Why do we sneak around?”
“No. I think I got that part. Why are Korean homosexuals so paranoid?”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I don’t know. Educate me.”
“Because in Korea, homosexuals are lower than any other life form. Many Asians are viciously prejudiced. They’re all very big on their racial bloodlines, and they despise anybody who makes that blood seem in any way tainted or perverted. Korean homosexuals are nonpeople, pariahs, beneath contempt. They don’t even peek out of the closet. That’s the world No lived in. He was scared to death about being discovered. Even more scared than me.”
“But everybody, the Koreans, the American Army, even Moran and Jackson, they’re all saying he was straight. How do you account for that?”
“Moran and Jackson know better. The rest of them probably believe he was. He was very persuasive. He even went so far as to date women, just to elude suspicion. They liked him, too. He was beautiful, you know. When he’d walk into a room, they’d all start eyeing him, as though he were a stud bull.”
“Did his parents know?”
“Absolutely not. That’s the single thing that scared No the most. He adored his parents. He knew it would kill them. I sometimes had this fantasy that he’d move back to the States with me, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He would never do anything to shame or disappoint his parents.”
This sounded like some weird twist on Romeo and Juliet, the old doomed love story, only in this case I somehow didn’t feel any surge of sympathy for the afflicted lover.
“Okay,” I said, moving along. “Your apartment was locked. There were no signs of a break-in, so if you didn’t kill Lee, that leaves only Moran and Jackson. If you had to pick one of them, which would it be?”
He mulled that over for a moment. For a frame defense to succeed, we had to have a scapegoat we could pin this on. We didn’t necessarily have to prove Moran or Jackson did it, but we had to create enough doubt in the minds of the court-martial board that they weren’t sure who did do it. In other words, there had to be a reasonable doubt that Whitehall was the guy.
What he finally said was, “Neither of them would’ve done it.”
“That’s not what I asked. Give us something to go on. Which one of the two?”
“Look, Major, maybe I’m terribly naive, I just don’t believe either of them could’ve done it.”
“Damn it, Whitehall, grow up. They’re both saying you did it.”
He snapped right back. “That’s not what they’re saying. I’ve read their testimonies. They’re saying they thought they heard a loud argument. They’re saying that No was in my room, with me. They’re saying I removed the belt from No’s neck. Except for the argument, that’s all true.”
I couldn’t argue with him on that point, since I hadn’t yet read the statements they’d made to Bales on the second go-around.
“Did Moran rape him?” I asked.
“You’ve gone beyond your allotted questions.”
“Who cares? Just answer the question.”
“No. You do some more research and come back to me again.”
I wanted to thrash him. The guy was living on rice and water, had twice been beaten, and was facing either a death sentence or life in a Korean prison – which he’d already said was tantamount to a death sentence. Despite all that, he was still playing ring around the rosy. The guy either had sawdust between his ears, or he had a death wish.
Maybe that was it, I suddenly realized. Maybe the damned fool wanted to become a martyr to the gay movement, a suffering Lothario who’d sacrificed himself for the cause. But that would only succeed if he was innocent. Which he wasn’t.
I glanced over at Katherine and she just shrugged her shoulders, like, What can you do?
“Look, Whitehall,” I said, “I have to be honest here. You’re starting to piss me off. We’ve got eleven more days to prepare your defense, so you better stop playing games.”
“I’m not playing games, Major. I’ve got my reasons.”
He was hunched over in a stubborn posture and it was pretty damned obvious I wasn’t going to get him to relent. I felt my temper rising. One of his co-counsels was in a hospital room on the edge of death, while the rest of us were working feverishly to defend him. The hell he wasn’t playing games.
I gritted my teeth and asked, “Could you at least tell me what the hell you’d like us to plead? Guilty or innocent?”
“Innocent, of course.”
“Innocent of what? Of homosexual acts? Of consorting with enlisted troops? Of rape? Of murder? Of necrophilia?”
“You tell me, Major. Isn’t that your job? You do your research, then come back and advise me.”
I couldn’t believe this. The guy was acting impudent. I glared at him through the darkness. He stared right back, unruffled. As for Katherine, the only sound I could hear coming from her was slow, shallow, tightly controlled breathing.
Why in the hell wasn’t she as mad as I was? Why wasn’t she jumping up and down and screaming at this jerk? She was the lead counsel, the anointed one sent over to save this guy. She should’ve been the one coaxing and boxing her client into opening up. She should’ve been livid with rage because he was being stupid and making it impossible for us to adequately defend him.
She wasn’t, though. She was as calm as ice.
CHAPTER 11
I had to wait until eleven o’clock that night to call the chief of the JAG Corps. He wasn’t in, but I got his deputy, a brigadier general named Courtland, which is another fabulous name for a lawyer, if you ask me. I’d worked with Courtland a few times over the years. We didn’t know each other well, but we were on first-name terms. Which, in the Army, meant he called me Sean, and I called him General.
I said, “Good morning, General. I hope it’s a nice day back there.”
“It’s hot and steamy back here. I’ve got a meeting in five minutes. What do you need, Sean?”
“I was wondering if you could tell me who’s been assigned as the prosecutor for the Whitehall case?”
“Uh, yeah sure. Eddie Golden. You know him?”
It was a perfectly duplicitous query because everybody in the JAG Corps knows Eddie Golden. Or at least they know of him.
The Navy and Marine Corps aviation wings have this nifty title they bestow on their most hot-shit fighter pilot, the Top Gun, which everybody in the world now knows about because of the corny movie of the same name. Although the Army JAG Corps doesn’t fly lethal arabesques like fighter pilots, we do have our own silly little version of this badge of honor, and it is known as the Hangman. It goes to the prosecuting attorney who’s put away the most bad guys. For the past six years, Eddie’s been the undisputed Hangman.
Eddie and I had faced off against each other twice in court, and obviously, since Eddie was still the reigning Hangman, I hadn’t made a dent in his record. To my credit, nobody held it against me – except my clients, of course – because both were fairly hopeless cases. But having seen Eddie in action at first hand, I was awed.
He looks more like Robert Redford than Robert Redford looks like Robert Redford, if that can be at all possible. Eddie is boyish, witty, brilliant, and has an assassin’s sense of timing. Women board members are Silly Putty in his hands. But male board members aren’t immune to his charms, either. See, Eddie has what we attorneys call the Pope’s Gift. What this means is that the Pope can walk outside on a perfectly cloudless, sunny day and flap open his umbrella and every Catholic for miles around will crack open theirs, too. After all,
the Pope’s supposed to be infallible. Eddie’s like that, too, although only in a courtroom when the show is on.
Now I’m not the vindictive type, but I don’t like losing twice. I can live with an even split, because I’m the kind of guy who figures a draw is damned close to a win. Not everybody loves a winner, but nobody likes a loser, and I’m perfectly content hanging out right in the middle of the pack. The thought of losing three times to Eddie almost made me sick.
That’s because the other thing about Eddie is that he’s not a nice winner. He sends every attorney he beats a baseball bat with a notch carved in it. I know this for a fact since I’ve got two of them stored in my closet at home.
I said, “Shit,” and the general chuckled. “Anything else I can help you with?”
“No, thank you very much.”
We then hung up.
The thing about that phone call was that it inspired me. Maybe I haven’t mentioned it yet, but the truth is, I really don’t like Eddie. No, that’s not true. I detest Eddie.
In Latin, there’s this wonderful phrase: Palmam qui meruit ferat, which, translated, means, “None but himself could be his parallel.” That fairly well describes Eddie. He’s a smug, arrogant, pompous prick who happens to win all the time and never lets anybody forget it.
Vowing not to receive another of his baseball bats, I stayed awake till one o’clock wading through more of the materials in the boxes. I started with Jackson’s initial testimony.
Private Everett Jackson was his full name, twenty years old, from Merryville, Mississippi, and trained by the Army to be an administrative clerk. He’d been in Korea nearly a full year and nothing in his personnel file jumped out at me. He seemed to be just another guy who’d made it through high school, skipped or put off college, and signed up. Maybe he wanted some adventure, maybe he wanted to get away from home, maybe he had nothing better to do. He was bright, though. His GT score, a test administered by the Armed Forces, was 126. That’s roughly comparable to his IQ, so he had brains.
I examined the photo appended to the inside jacket. I tried to overlook that I already knew he was gay, but frankly, he looked it. That’s not easy to accomplish in a black-and-white Army photo, when you’re standing rigidly at attention, in Army greens. But he did. There was an unmistakable willowiness, an effeminate slouch.
Before “don’t ask, don’t tell” came to pass, Everett Jackson would’ve been singled out and discharged ten seconds after he walked through the gate for basic training. Some stiff-necked drill sergeant in a Smokey the Bear hat would’ve taken one look at him, sniffed derisively once or twice, then dragged him into the latrine, rammed his face within two inches of Jackson’s, and fiercely demanded, “Don’t you dare lie to me, boy. You tell me where you like to put that little pecker of yours.”
Moran claimed in his initial statement that he’d invited Jackson to Whitehall’s party because the poor kid was bereft of friends, that he was a barracks rat in need of a reprieve. There was probably some truth in that. The other troops probably despised Jackson. They probably treated him like a leper.
What intrigued me was why Moran plucked Jackson out of the ranks, made him his company clerk, and chose to have an affair with him. Moran was a tough, manly-looking guy, the last man anybody would ever suspect of being gay. Unless, that is, he hung out with a neon gay like Jackson. I was making an assumption here that Moran and Jackson were lovers, but the facts being what they were, that didn’t seem like a real wild leap.
And, since Jackson was so visibly gay, why would Moran take the risk of associating with him?
Anyway, Jackson’s initial testimony tracked closely with Whitehall’s and Moran’s. It did so because he cloaked himself in ignorance. He claimed he drank way too much. He claimed he drank way too fast. He claimed he passed out at 11:45 on the dot. I had some trouble swallowing that one. Not many people check their watches before they lapse into a drunken coma.
The next thing he claimed he remembered was being shaken by someone and told to go to the second bedroom on the left. So he did. He claimed he then slept soundly until Moran awoke him at 5:30 A.M. and told him Lee was dead. He said he got up, walked down the hall, peeked in the room and saw the body, but only got a quick glimpse, because the apartment was instantly flooded with Korean policemen.
I put down his packet and went back to the statement by Sergeant Wilson Blackstone, the first MP to arrive at the scene. According to Blackstone, he and his partner did not arrive at the apartment until 6:08, by which time the Korean police were already there in force. I then checked the statement from the MP shift officer who’d dispatched Blackstone in the first place. The shift officer happened to be the same Captain Bittlesby I’d spoken with to get the humvee and escort to go to the embassy.
According to Bittlesby, he’d taken the call from Moran at 5:29, and, after speaking with his colonel, he’d talked with the Itaewon station commander. The time of that call was 5:45 A.M. Figure it took the Itaewon station commander two or three minutes to call his own shift officer and order him to dispatch an investigating team to the apartment. Itaewon is a fairly compact district. If the traffic was light at that hour of the morning, it might’ve taken another ten to fifteen minutes for the Korean cops to get to Whitehall’s apartment. That meant the Korean cops could not have gotten to the scene before 6:00 A.M. at the earliest, barely ahead of Blackstone.
In other words, Jackson was lying about how much he knew, if he wasn’t lying about everything, which he probably was. Anyway, there was at least a thirty-minute gap between the time Moran woke him and the time when the Korean cops arrived.
It was just a guess, but it seemed a pretty good one that Whitehall, Moran, and Jackson used that thirty minutes to ponder their situation and conspire. Jackson had enough brains to try to cover that up, but not enough sense to get his times correct.
But so what?
The “so what” was that it eliminated any doubt there’d been at least a hurried, halfhearted effort at patching together a common alibi, at devising a common defense to cover one another’s asses.
Something had gone wrong, though. Somehow the scheme had unraveled and Whitehall was hung out to dry. To understand how their plan got deconstructed, I had to first reconstruct it.
I tried to picture how it might’ve gone down. They were all soldiers – a captain, a first sergeant, and a private – and in a pure world, that would’ve dictated a cast-iron pecking order. Whitehall or Moran would’ve devised the scheme, and Jackson, since he was only a private, would’ve dutifully gone along. He was probably scared out of his wits anyway – at being exposed as a homosexual, at being implicated in a murder, at being arrested by foreign police in a strange country. He would’ve been malleable and compliant.
At least that’s how it would’ve gone down under ordinary conditions. These weren’t ordinary conditions, though. These were three gay men who were sexually involved with one another in ways and combinations I couldn’t possibly fathom. Everything was topsy-turvy.
There was too much here I couldn’t begin to comprehend, things that were beyond my ken. Whitehall had smelled me out right away; I knew next to nothing about gays and their peculiar relationships. I knew who did, though.
I therefore left my room, took the elevator down two floors, and walked to room 430. I knocked hard three times, then tried to look perfectly guileless.
A light came on inside the room, the peephole darkened, the bolt slid open, and the door swung inward.
Katherine was wearing a skimpy T-shirt that came a quarter of the way down her thighs. She did have great legs, with long, taut muscles, slender calves, and thin ankles. Her hair was mussed and she looked groggy. She audibly groaned. Delighted to see me she clearly wasn’t.
I tried to hide my rapture at interrupting her sleep. With flawless insouciance, I said, “I’m sorry to awaken you” – which I wasn’t – “but I’ve got a few questions” – which I did.
“Drummond, it’s one o’clock in the mor
ning.”
“Oh, so it is,” I admitted, barging my way past her. “Well, you’re already awake anyway.”
She followed me, quietly cursing. She leaned against the wall and crossed her arms across her chest. “This better be good. Really good.”
“Right,” I said, falling into a chair and kicking up my feet onto her desk, just to be sure she knew I was settling in for the duration. “Start with this. Do you believe Whitehall’s claim that he and Lee were in love?”
She climbed back onto her bed, got under the covers, and hiked them up across her chest. “Drummond, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m an attorney, not a lie detector.”
“Right. But here’s my problem. You’ve got four gay guys at a party. One gets murdered. His corpse contains semen from two different men. One of those men claims he and the deceased were madly in love, an eternal love, the type that comes along only once in a lifetime. See my problem here? Don’t gays get jealous like heteros?”
“Of course they do.”
“Then how does it square? If Whitehall and Lee were an item, something doesn’t fit here. If Moran raped Whitehall’s amour, why in the hell would Whitehall invite him to sleep over?”
“I never assumed Moran raped him,” she said.
“No?”
She gave me an outsize stare. “Do you have any idea how rare homosexual rapes are?”
“Frankly, I don’t,” I admitted. “See, my mind’s all cluttered up with all those useless heterosexual things.”
If she got my taunt, she ignored it. “It’s almost unheard of. At least when the act is between two adults. Homosexuals are not nearly as sexually aggressive as heteros. Even in homosexual pedophilia, forcible rapes are rare, although of course, pedophile cases are automatically classified as statutory rapes because the victims are underage. But actual, forcible rape is almost unheard of. Forget everything you know about hetero rapes.”
“So you’re saying hetero rape and homo rape aren’t the same?”